Integrated Language Definition Testing: Enabling Test-Driven Language Development

The reliability of compilers, interpreters, and development environments for programming languages is essential for effective software development and maintenance. They are often tested only as an afterthought. Languages with a smaller scope, such as domain-specific languages, often remain untested. General-purpose testing techniques and test...

Declaratively Defining Domain-Specific Language Debuggers

Tool support is vital to the effectiveness of domain-specific languages. With language workbenches, domain-specific languages and their tool support can be generated from a combined, high-level specification. This paper shows how such a specification can be extended to describe a debugger for a language. To realize this, we introduce a meta...

Declarative specification of template-based textual editors

Syntax discoverability has been a crucial advantage of structure editors for new users of a language. Despite this advantage, structure editors have not been widely adopted. Nevertheless, the Cheetah system, developed at Capgemini, leverages a structure editor to aid domain experts modeling tax-benefit rules in a domain specific language. The...

Comparing Static Semantics Specifications for the IceDust DSL: A Case Study of Statix

Reusable tools for engineering software languages can bridge the gap between formal specification and implementation, lowering the bar for engineers to design and implement programming languages. Among such tools belong NaBL2 and its successor Statix, which are meta-languages for declaratively specifying the static semantics of programming...

Redesigning the Spoofax Testing Language

The Spoofax Testing Language (SPT) is the existing solution for testing in the Spoofax language workbench. It allows developers of domain specific languages to write their test cases declaratively. As it aims to be implementation agnostic, developers don't need to concern themselves with the details of the artifacts generated by Spoofax, and can...

Dataflow Analysis in a Language Workbench

Dataflow analysis is a powerful tool used for program optimization, static analysis, and editor services for many programming languages. Spoofax, a language workbench, contains a domain-specific language called FlowSpec for the definition of control-flow and dataflow semantics that language developers can use to implement dataflow analyses for...

Modernizing the WebDSL Front-End: A Case Study in SDF3 and Statix

The front-end of a compiler reads the source program and performs analyses such as type checking. The goal of the front-end is to check for the presence of syntactic and semantic errors before the program is passed to the back-end of the compiler for tasks such as optimization and code generation.<br/><br/>WebDSL is a domain-specific language...

Lessons learned from developing mbeddr: a case study in language engineering with MPS

Language workbenches are touted as a promising technology to engineer languages for use in a wide range of domains, from programming to science to business. However, not many real-world case studies exist that evaluate the suitability of language workbench technology for this task. This paper contains such a case study. In particular, we...

Building Blocks for Language Workbenches

This dissertation presents research on techniques, methods, and tool support for domain-specific language engineering. Domain-specific language engineering is the discipline of designing, developing, and maintaining domain-specific programming languages. The focus of this thesis is the architecture of language workbenches their underlying...

Declarative Syntax Definition for Modern Language Workbenches

Programming languages are one of the key components of computer science,<br/>allowing programmers to control, define, and change the behaviour of computer<br/>systems. However, programming languages require considerable effort to design, implement, and maintain. Fortunately, declarative approaches can be used to define programming languages...

Bootstrapping Domain-Specific Meta-Languages in Language Workbenches

It is common practice to bootstrap compilers of programming languages. By using the compiled language to implement the compiler, compiler developers can code in their own high-level language and gain a large-scale test case. In this paper, we investigate bootstrapping of compiler-compilers as they occur in language workbenches. Language...

Online Name-Based Navigation for Software Meta-languages

Software language design and implementation often involve specifications written in various esoteric meta-languages. Language workbenches generally include support for precise name-based navigation when browsing language specifications <i>locally</i>, but such support is lacking when browsing the same specifications <i>online</i> in code...

Using Spoofax to Support Online Code Navigation

Spoofax is a language workbench. A Spoofax language specification generally includes name resolution: the analysis of bindings between definitions and references. When browsing code in the specified language using Spoofax, the bindings appear as hyperlinks, supporting precise name-based code navigation. However, Spoofax cannot be used for...

Principled Syntactic Code Completion using Placeholders

Principled syntactic code completion enables developers to change source code by inserting code templates, thus increasing developer efficiency and supporting language exploration. However, existing code completion systems are ad-hoc and neither complete nor sound. They are not complete and only provide few code templates for selected...

A Component-Based Formal Language Workbench

The CBS framework supports component-based specification of programming languages. It aims to significantly reduce the effort of formal language specification, and thereby encourage language developers to exploit formal semantics more widely. CBS provides an extensive library of reusable language specification components, facilitating co...

Static analyses for Stratego programs

Model driven software development is gaining momentum in the software engineering world. One approach to model driven software development is the design and development of domain-specific languages allowing programmers and users to spend more time on their core business and less on addressing non problem- specific issues. Language workbenches...